In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. After pointing out that the publication of the Black Notebooks only makes this criticism more interesting to revisit, I first of all discuss passages from both earlier and later writings in which Levinas explicitly takes issue with Heidegger’s claim that there is no self outside of a specific socio-historical community. I then explain how these criticisms are reflected in (...) Levinas’s own account, arguing that Levinasian subjectivity and alterity are precisely defined by their not belonging to a larger unity; to the extent that they partake in a multi-personal collectivity, this does not take the form of a traditional community. In the final section, I look into a different and seemingly opposing argument Levinas makes against Heidegger: on the basis of the latter’s reflections on death, he argues that Dasein is anti-social rather than overly immersed in the socio-historical. Arguing that this rests on a misreading of Being and Time, I use this opportunity to raise questions about Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger and his “otherwise than being-with” more generally, for Levinas’s account runs into several problems as well. Yet as I will conclude, this in fact offers a valuable insight, not just for the present-day reception of Heidegger, but also for thinking community today. It indicates that a radical break with human situatedness does not automatically fare better than a firmly enrooted account of existence. (shrink)

This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues (...) that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [il y a], the article seeks to establish the impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’ subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the differences between the thought of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas concerning the “Rights of Man”, in relation to stateless persons. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt evinces a profound scepticism towards this ideal, which for her was powerless without being tethered to citizenship. But Arendt’s own idea of the “Right to have Rights” is critiqued here as being inadequate to the ethical demand placed upon states by refugees, in failing to articulate just what states might be (...) responsible for. I argue that the ethical philosophy of Levinas meets this lacuna in Arendt’s thought, via his concept of the Face as the locus of human dignity and to which states can be recalled to responsibility. Levinas wrote several papers on what he called “the phenomenology of the Rights of Man”, and in his phrase, which provides a summation of precisely what is lacking in Arendt’s arguments: “In the face – a right is there”. (shrink)

Based on a reading of K. E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand and Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, the paper aims to show that it is respectively through trust and love, hospitality and friendship that the two thinkers envisage humans as being capable of realising unfulfillable and impossible ethical demands. It will be argued that they develop their ethical thinking along similar lines, yet, even when they come closest to each other conceptually, a difference in their phenomenological analysis of the I (...) and the other remains, which it is paramount to keep in mind in order to assess what they may contribute to each other’s thinking. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to clarify the notion of pluralism and religious pluralism against the background of disputations on the globalized challenges of religious pluralism, for example the incompatibility between different conceptions of religious pluralism, especially from the lens of a possible conversation on religious pluralism between Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. With a detailed reading into the development of the conceptualization of religious pluralism in each author, addressing the questions such as what is genuine pluralism and on (...) what ground the conflicts within religious pluralism can be re-accounted, we make our passage from challenging the total reliance on political unification by the effort of Habermas, towards adopting a Levinasian alternative path that prioritizes ethical relation over individual ways of plurality in the realization of each one’s good life. Even though it can be acknowledged that Habermas raised the right question against the relativism way of seeing pluralism, it is by Levinas, the ontological ground of pluralism and the universal dimension of the plural are thought not only through justice and politics but more importantly, through a way of responding to the non-familiar tradition with love, where human religion has a single dimension that is the transcendental notion of charity and love. (shrink)

The present article aims to illuminate a notion of finite freedom in both Heidegger and Levinas. Levinas criticizes the Heideggerian ontology for holding an egoistic, unconstrained notion of freedom. The article first responds to such a criticism by showing that the Heideggerian notion of freedom as self-binding involves normativity. It then argues that both Heidegger and Levinas propose a notion of finite freedom as the unity of autonomy and heteronomy. Finally, the article also sheds light on what different approaches to (...) the source of normativity separate the two philosophers’ understandings of freedom. (shrink)

For both Levinas and Løgstrup, the moral encounter is characterized by an asymmetrical prioritization of the other over the self. Some take Løgstrup’s account to be an improvement on Levinas’s, however, insofar as it appears to both foreswear the hyperbole of the latter’s view and ground the ethical claim in the natural conditions of human life. This paper argues, in contrast, that Løgstrup’s own account is equally hyperbolic in its characterization of the self as fundamentally evil, and that his attempt (...) to ground the ethical demand in structures of ‘life’ raises serious difficulties. I will argue that Levinas’s stronger commitment to phenomenology both rules out the problematic metaphysical claims on which Løgstrup’s ontological ethics depends and helps explain the methodological function of Levinas’s own hyperbole. Unlike Løgstrup, Levinas insists that the challenge is not eradicating the claims of the self, but rather resisting its pretention to a global normative priority. In making this case I refute the argument that Levinas, unlike Løgstrup, is committed to a ‘command’ view of morality—whereby it is the other person’s authoritative status that underwrites the moral force of the claim, not the content of the claim itself. But on Levinas’s view, ‘demand’ and ‘command’ accounts merge in his understanding of the face-to-face encounter because responding to the content of the demand—that I treat the other’s claim as reason-giving— just is to see the other person as an authority capable of making legitimate claims on me. (shrink)

Based on the reception of Emmanuel Levinas philosophy in the English-speaking world, the paper highlights some tendencies in reading and commenting on classical philosophical works that have been the focus of attention for a long time. The author makes a suggestion that we can find persistent but nonetheless dynamic, patterns of commenting and interpreting. The first wave of Levinas studies was apologetic and laudatory. Its main task was to introduce new concepts, i.e. to paraphrase. The second wave was much more (...) appropriative and critical. In this period, the scholars tried to apply the philosophy of the Other to existing problems or they tried to resolve the paradoxes that were the products of apologetic readings. The today’s third wave recreates and readjusts interpretive strategies inherent to the first and second wave. To explain this dynamics of reading, the paper introduces a normative scheme that consists of three regulative principles – “faithfully”, “truthfully”, and “ethically”. Due to this tripartite opposition, in which “faithfully” refers to fidelity to an original, “truthfully” refers to the search for universal truth, and “ethically” refers to the inaccessibility for an ego to grab hold of a text of another person, commenting grows intensive. In addition, the opposition of “faithfully” and “truthfully” demonstrates some liberty in such, to some extent, involuntary practice as commenting. This reflexion helps identify the current phase of commenting on classical texts and the intentions of readers and commentators. What is more, it provides justifications for innovative readings of Levinas’ oeuvre as well as the texts of other great philosophers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Prima facie, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas would seem to be inherently averse to literature as an ethical mode. Indeed, in his early work, up to and including Totality and Infinity (1961), literary art is often censured with what amounts to Platonic zeal. However, as I will demonstrate, this criticism stands alongside what is seemingly an incongruous use of literary art as a means of ethical exemplification. By exploring this tension, I will show how the contra-epistemic aesthetic of S. (...) Y. Agnon (1888–1970) can be read within ethical terms consistent with Levinas’s philosophical position. (shrink)

Resumen: El propósito de este artículo es exponer la tesis levinasiana de la inevitabilidad de lo dicho, teniendo como trasfondo algunas cuestiones epistemológicas que suscita. Para esto, se comienza presentando la contraposición que establece Levinas entre verdad del desvelamiento y verdad del testimonio, destacando sus diferencias más radicales. Posteriormente, teniendo la subjetividad como hilo conductor, se reconstruye el camino que relacionaría ambos tipos de verdad, mostrando cómo la tesis de la inevitabilidad de lo dicho adquiere relevancia en las discusiones epistemológicas. (...) Finalmente, se concluye sugiriendo algunos aportes de esta reflexión para las consideraciones acerca de una racionalidad renovada.: This paper discusses the Levinasian thesis of the inevitability of the Said, having as its background certain epistemological issues arising from that thesis. I begin by showing the contraposition between truth of disclosure and truth of testimony, as Levinas defines them, and point out the most radical differences between the two. I then reconstruct, with subjectivity as the connecting thread, a way of relating both kinds of truth, showing how the thesis on the inevitability of the Said is relevant to epistemological discussions. I conclude by suggesting some considerations with regard to a renewed rationality. (shrink)